Free Writing: Essays and Memoirs

Question. Examinations do more harm than good. Do you agree? Write an essay in about 350 words. [10]

Model answer — Thirty Tests and One Question

We say that we value understanding, and then we measure it with a stopwatch. For three hours in Chaitra, a student's two years are converted into a grade, and everything he has learnt that cannot be written down in that time is treated as though it did not happen. Examinations are not useless — a country of thirty million needs some fair way of deciding who enters which college — but as they are set at present they measure memory rather than understanding, and the fear they produce costs more learning than their discipline is worth.

The first charge against them is that they test recall, not thought. A student can score full marks on the definition of photosynthesis and still be unable to explain why a plant on a dark window sill turns yellow. Our question papers reward the sentence that has been memorised in the exact words of the textbook, and our answer keys frequently punish the student who puts the same idea in his own. What is being measured, then, is speed of recall under pressure — a real skill, but a narrow one, and not the one the syllabus claims to teach.

The second charge is heavier. Fear is a poor teacher. In the six months before the board examination, learning in most classrooms stops and revision begins: past papers, guess papers, model sets. Curiosity is postponed because curiosity is not on the marking scheme. A student who might have spent an evening taking a radio apart spends it instead copying the ten most probable questions, and the habit of asking why quietly dies.

It must be granted that examinations do some good. They impose a deadline, and most of us work only to deadlines. They are also, for all their faults, blind: the examiner in Kathmandu does not know whose son is writing. That fairness is worth defending, and nobody who argues against examinations should pretend otherwise.

But fairness is an argument for examinations of some kind, not for these. A paper that asked students to apply an idea to a situation they had never seen would be just as blind, just as fair, and would test something worth testing. Until we set that paper, we shall go on grading memory and calling it education.

Why it scores. The thesis is in the last sentence of the introduction and concedes something before it argues; each body paragraph opens with a flat topic sentence and then earns it with a concrete case; the fourth paragraph gives the other side properly before answering it; the conclusion proposes a remedy instead of repeating paragraph one; and the sentence lengths vary from three words to thirty.

Question. Explain why so many young people leave the hill villages of Nepal, and what a village loses when they go. Write about 350 words. [10]

Model answer — What the Hills Send Away

Walk through a hill village in Gandaki at midday and you will meet children, mothers and the very old, and almost nobody between eighteen and forty-five. The absence is not an accident. Three forces pull the young out of these villages — work, schooling and the shape of the land itself — and what is left behind loses more than a pair of hands.

Work is the first and the plainest. A terraced field of eight ropanis will feed a family for part of the year and pay for almost nothing else: no fees, no medicines, no roof of corrugated sheet. Wages in the Gulf, in Malaysia or simply in Pokhara are earned in cash, every month, and cash is what a household needs the moment it wants anything the village cannot grow. A young man does not leave because he dislikes farming; he leaves because farming has no salary.

Schooling is the second. Primary classes exist in nearly every ward, but the campus that offers Grade 11 is often three hours away on foot. Once a student boards in the district headquarters at sixteen, the village becomes a place he visits in Dashain. Education, which the village paid for, has taught him a way of living the village cannot supply.

The third force is the land. Hill soil is thin, the plots are small and divided again at every inheritance, and a single monsoon landslide can remove a year's work in an afternoon. Where the road has not come, the cost of carrying anything to market eats the profit of selling it.

What a village loses is not only labour. It loses the age group that repairs trails, carries the sick to the health post and argues in the ward assembly. Fields fall out of cultivation and the forest creeps back over them; festivals thin; a school with eleven pupils closes and the next family leaves because the school has closed. The money sent home builds better houses, but the houses stand empty most of the year.

The hills, in short, are exporting exactly the people who could have rebuilt them, and each departure makes the next one easier.

Why it scores. The introduction names the three causes and so promises a shape; each body paragraph takes one cause and supports it with a concrete detail (eight ropanis, three hours on foot, eleven pupils); the fourth paragraph turns from causes to consequences as the question required; there is no opinion anywhere; and the closing sentence states a pattern rather than a preference.

Question. Write a memoir of an incident from your school days that you still think about. Write in about 350 words. [10]

Model answer — The Morning the Bus Did Not Come

I was fifteen, and the bus that took us from Bhanu to the examination centre at Damauli left the chautari at half past five. On the morning of the compulsory mathematics paper I was there at twenty past, with my admit card in a polythene bag inside my shirt because the sky had that low grey look that means rain before nine. At six o'clock the bus had not come. At half past six the tea-shop man said, without looking up from his kettle, that the drivers were on strike.

I remember exactly three things about the hour that followed: the smell of wet dust as the first drops came down, the sound of my own breathing, and a boy from the year below me crying quietly by the milestone. I remember no fear at all, which surprises me now. There was simply a distance — nineteen kilometres — and three hours in which to cover it, and it did not occur to me that the two might not fit together.

So I walked. For the first hour I walked fast and alone; then two other boys caught up and we walked together without saying much. At Byas a milk truck stopped of its own accord, and the driver, who asked nothing and was told nothing, moved four steel cans to make room for us on the tray. We sat among them with the rain coming sideways, and I held the polythene bag against my chest with both hands the whole way.

I reached the hall at twenty-five past nine, twenty-five minutes late, soaked to the knee. The invigilator looked at my admit card, looked at my trousers, and said nothing. He gave me the paper. I scored 71.

What I think about now is not the walk, and not the mark. It is the milk-truck driver, whose name I never asked and whose face I could not describe. He lost twenty minutes of his morning for three boys he would never see again, and he did it without the smallest suggestion that he was doing anything. I have been trying, ever since, to be somebody's milk truck.

Why it scores. One morning, not a whole school career; the detail is physical (the polythene bag, the steel cans, the rain sideways) rather than emotional; the older voice appears twice — which surprises me now, What I think about now — and the last line turns a private memory into something a reader can use.